A simple folded flyer (an excerpt from, Fresh Diamonds)

fig.78) Sinead O'Connor

The low picnic tables that are under the elm tree are also brown. They’ve been scuffed up and scratched with very much sorrow and too much lament. What grass is around them is frail and burnt. But the dirt, that's just mud and it's full of ash and sharp nasty glass. Only the older kids play here. They kiss each other and then they go to school where they learn about the lines that separate each of the poorer states in our union from all of the other states. It's so cool and so sad that this very modern age of agony knows itself so well.
"Like a palmist being read her nightly news knows, the nightly news is the heavy news. So let's set this little whistle up, you can tell me where or when it hurts. After all this whole century smells like art. So much so, it's all the way up in our eyeballs now,” WSBill spits into another glass and snaps his towel like he's a dessicated golf pro.
"I’ll bet that Canada knows us more better," The Captain smiles. WSBill fades below the bar with a clink before floating back up to eye level. There's the Minutemen and then the Zombies but there's something in between. What I've decided is that the secret voice, the one living behind everything needs to sound more like my mother. Because right now, it sounds too much like it's an old dial tone. It's a sound I only hear when you're not home. It's little like the sound of everything when it slides off the back of the Buick.
"It's all about the treasure's map and not about its trove. Cataloging is the business of arrangement, it's about organizing and holding onto the legacy of our presence. It's about making sense of the patterns within those systems," So says the Captain. "It's what we've developed to keep perpetuity mindful and closer than it is far away. In other words it makes, small the location of, rather than the actual meaning for our lives. We can't carry the boon of our cherished exchanges with us but we can make a reasonable note about them and keep that in our pocket."
I dream of running away, dream of agents in the rusty snow. I'm out on a short cot behind the stacked boxes of cacao in the little yellow room beside to the bar. The short brim of a Captains cap is pulled down over my scuppered eyes. There's a gentle rasp from my snoring that waggles the hanging bulb above. There's a stained cotton shirt bunched up underneath me. It says, LOU REED.
The diabetes is cold and quiet settling into my morning feet. My face long and my eyes lick at the light like they're a timid cat at it's first saucer of milk. So it is with deadly sleep and it's beasts. The chequed floor and the small tables are like Giotto well lubed. Everything around the bar is going in a circle that's being filled in from the sides with dishes and the drawings of busy animals that are touching and making a vomitous smell happen.
I wake up again and this time I feel as though I've been touched in the brain. I'm naturally nervous and I'm prone to gas, so when I wake up and I'm on an operating table that's in front of your television, my swollen foot goes numb as a blank fish.
I wake up alone and I feel trapped like a bullet on a speeding train that's still heading straight towards the sun. Condescension swirls around the ends of the draperies and into my ears, it's a vast song filled with preening birds and old lust and bulging pockets. There are very important beetles scurrying up from inside the woodwork like they're locust demanding, "me first, no me-me-me!"
They're in the front. They are on the top. They are way more all alone then everyone that I'll know. One is screaming from the edge of my teacup, "memory is apartheid." While another one yells, "money is not your vote."
There are signs about service and signs about sanctity and there are signs about the pallor of sin. "Quiet desperation isn't the only desperation," this is what they sing.
I remember before we met, when I could lay outside in the hot sun and think of Constantine and Gregory. I like calendars, especially large white ones with a big picture at the top, Guillaume Apollinaire, mustachioed and bandaged his sidelong glance is like the eager spreading of my own legs.
I also had a shirt with a picture of LOU REED on it. I would wear it out to the bar and order deep-deep, very deep cocktails while wearing it. I talked about the novel that I was writing, wherein I leveraged the machinery of it's chapters into a serviceable array of circadian problems that involved both clouds unicorns and rainbows showering themselves down on the being of one small and lonely boy. It was like they were ice cream sprinkles and he was a cool prop somewhat recessed as if to represent us all. I once drew a picture of this, it was brown on a sheet of white paper. I folded it up and slipped inside a book of poetry, that's what I did.
There were times when I could think of nothing else. Nothing but trains and windows and the soup on my plate. I would dream about the warm and tumbling matter that resembles the dork cloud of limbs and bolts being flung from an afternoon haircut that's been translated into cartoon. The Captain later says, "Sometimes things just look like that. It's like time travel." His empty glass is wagging. "This is what it's like to be left above the couch too long. It's like being in a bar without a name."
The hatchet job is nearly through. The singers are going home soon. The waitress is changing in the back and someone named, WSBill is counting down the night drawer. The bench squawks under me like an angry victim. Somewhere a under a booth, the judge sings out, "Duck..."
After a bit my drink arrives. It's in a short wide glass that has a fat and heavy bottom. It feels satisfying to lift or hold this. After a minute of reflection, what can only be the Judge's bailiff responds, "Goose?" So goes the night.
WSBill is telling me about a broken umbrella that's caught in a nearby fence. He see's children pass by it everyday. They always have these tiny signs with them. They're mounted on little stained popsicle sticks and they say things like, I love my dog Gay. Or, Your fish Pisses gas. Then WSBill stops. He looks at me and he says, "There's a secret voice that lives behind everything but it doesn't work at all. There's been a white paper sign taped to its console for awhile. I know the guy that wrote that sign and he's selling the pen."
It's been suggested that we eat the rich and then we can send out for some more mashed potatoes. We have not replaced the fantasy of power and its command of ownership, throughout all of Pottsylvania. We have not pulled down our Christmas lights and replaced them with new poems and the songs of the disadvantaged, the poor and the ominous dread that accompanies our dread remorse. We have not recognized our own indenture.
This is what WSBill has said, "I've been away for too long. I've been thinking about things and I've been reading all of your little poems. As if to stand I says to thee, Fishing for deep with a hook made of bait. This with it's sad harangue of spite-spite-spite from the boaty pale between my knees, Here's to Jack and James and William too. Here's to the man I'll be. The president of my army is a president's pecker and the world is in someone else's hand, you'll see? This man stands with his hands above the glans in this stanza as it ends with a bang and wham-wham-wham."
"The Captain's Harlequin is drowning in beige under piles of pearlescent pink semen. Soon we will, to a laughing man begat another world of even more scorn, Ha! Sooner then later the gorgeous will spank the poor of spirit, as gorgeous soon will spank us all. Marching hens go, cluck. They're first to the door and waiting there like they're baggers. Marching hens go, cluck. They're first to the dance at hand. With its vile lurkers, their lone noodle eyes are bathed in white, like a Laura Latinsky, bump-bump-bump. It's a subtle acknowledgment to the gone lostness of their vast fruits, the years of jagged steps and the simple hard of concrete on which the eggs will fall. Bump-bump-bump they cross the line."
"But first we'll need sleeping bags and flashlights and bags of stale popcorn. There needs to be people sitting up with their pillows between their knees talking about the time they went down to Maine or Albuquerque and it didn't work out for them. There needs to be more soda-pop and some funny soundtrack albums playing long into the night. There needs to be votes, lots and lots of votes about everything that can be done with our hair. There needs to be construction paper and twisted macaroni and fight songs made out of tough flint, cat gut, and a whispered rhyme or two. Let's talk about boys and angels and a dog heaven that's not full of poop. Let's draw pictures of the couch on it's wheels and call it a telephone to anyone that will answer."